Using our Pirate Bay standard as above we can see that there are quite a few categories encompassed by the larger heading of “Video”. I’m going to cut those down to three core areas – Movies (cinema), DVDs and TV and as before illustrate how pirates, although violating copyright, provide services legal channels are failing to.
Movies
Similar to the music industry the Movie industry has a long founded business model established long before the Internet age which consists of product promotion, usually in the form of previews, trailers and reviews followed by a full cinema release of a number of months, followed several months later with release to rental services and DVD. This is the cycle Pirates endeavour to break.
Movie producers participate in their own form of dishonest marketing similar to that of the music industry. In order to entice customers to the cinema and pay extortionate box office fees to see films the movie industry hits us with trailers and previews, short sections of the film edited together in exciting collages often with dramatic music all intended to pique curiosity and interest. Unfortunately due to the heavily edited nature of these “teasers” it’s really impossible to gauge how much you will enjoy a film. It’s quite easy to make a boring or rubbish film look good if you condense all the good bits down into 30-60 seconds of footage. It is therefore difficult to gauge what is worth your money, and what isn’t, and at £7 a pop bad choices are a costly affair and there is no refund if you genuinely don’t enjoy the film.
Piracy at least allows movie-goers to check out a low quality copy of the film before committing to the full ticket price.
It wouldn’t be difficult for the Movie industry to upload a low quality stream of the 1st ~20-30 minutes or so of their films to the Internet to allow people the opportunity to gauge whether or not they want to part with their cash to see the rest in a theatre. There are already a plethora of video streaming sites out there who’d be happy to host the content for free, and as I discussed in Part1, YouTube has a system in place to allow the monetisation of content via adsense. So why doesn’t it happen? Because if people get the chance to see how shit the first half hour is they won’t pay to see the rest, right? Sounds pretty fucking dishonest to me. If the industry is confident in the quality of its products, why isn’t it prepared to implement this system?
Of course not all pirated copies of movies are purely for “research purposes”, some people just don’t like the cinema or have difficulty getting there for whatever reason – they still want to see the films, but not on the industries terms, so fuck it, it’s up on torrents, I’m tired tonight, can’t be arsed going out, I’ll pirate. Why isn’t there a legal channel? Why isn’t there a way for me to stream new movies to my home over the Internet? The infrastructure is there, but the service is not, why? There is obviously a demand for such a service, but it isn’t there in a legal form. So shitty tele-sync cam footage will continue to appear on the internet. The industry could attempt to hack into that demand by providing some sort of reasonably priced pay-per-stream service for new cinema releases, but they haven’t even tried. They’ve had 5-10 years to try and get something together, but they’d rather spend millions extorting a pittance out of three Swedish dudes who had the misfortune to pick a snazzy title for their bittorrent index site and tracker that became popular.
Now, I’m not naive, I’m fully aware that a significant proportion of Pirates are just cunts who want shit for free, but the truth is absolutely nobody knows what proportion of Pirates straight up steal the material they pirate and what proportion go on to pay for it in some fashion – the point here is that the Industry has failed to pick up on obvious demand and use it to their advantage.
DVD
Sort of a misleading title, but snazzier than “movies post-theatrical run”. I’m not really talking about DVDs as such, but the consumption of video in any form. DVDs are typically released a number of months, possibly extending up to a year or more after the films initial cinema release. “DVD rips” are available to pirate as soon as the DVD hits the shelf somewhere – anywhere – in the world, and in fact, often long before that, sometimes months before. The quality of rips ranges from low/medium of ~700MB-1.4GB to full DVD ~4GB, and now even Blu-Ray rips are pretty commonly available. However it isn’t the higher quality stuff that is most popular, it’s the lower end stuff that’s overwhelmingly more downloaded. Now it’s hard to say if the reasons for this are purely speed or bandwidth related – higher quality stuff = bigger file size = slower download. There’s obviously a demand for this content, but at the moment the availability is low, and in the UK it’s particularly pathetic with the only real retailer being Apples iTunes store at the moment with limited choice and inflated prices.
When there’s demand for a product the industry should be all over it, but they’re just plain not. All I can figure is that they’re trying to defend their profit margins by trying to force consumers down the restrictive avenues of their existing business models focussed around physical media while criminalising those avenues they have thus far failed to utilise.
TV
The issue here is the availability of content after its original air date, i.e. online streaming services. This is an area that has really boomed recently, all the major terrestrial TV networks in the UK now have some form of streaming service while Channel 4 and the BBC have been working hard at getting their archives online – Channel 4 have actually got a large whack of their archives available to stream right now (although their website and media player can only be described with the word Shite in my opinion). So that’s all good (apart from the Channel 4 setup which is Shite).
Where the problem lies is with the international stuff. Us Brits can’t watch the streaming services for US channels and the ‘Murcans can’t watch any of ours. Most of them probably don’t care much that they can’t watch our TV, but a lot of us rather do want to watch theirs, therefore there is rather a large amount of TV piracy going on, mostly of popular American shows. You see, there are often very long periods of time (we’re talking years in some cases) between the US air date and the air dates in various countries around the world, people want to know what’s happening in Lost or whatever, they can’t wait and they end up Pirating. Anybody trying to hammer out a deal that makes US TV shows available at the same time world wide?
Thought not. So, piracy again provides a service the industry does not.
That’s the end of this segment kiddies. I think I got a bit ranty and preachy in that one, but I’m leaving it all in exactly how it dribbled out my brain.
Next up, Games and e-comics, I don’t foresee either being particularly long so I reckon they’ll fit into a one-er. I may also fire out my proposal for a digital rights system that embraces file sharing.
freedoms_stain, quite tired actually, out.
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